How to unroot a Fire TV and switch back to stock updates from Amazon

This guide will walk you through the steps of reverting a rooted Fire TV with custom ROMs installed into a stock Fire TV that can receive regular updates over-the-air from Amazon. It will show you how to remove the boot menu, remove ClockworkMod, remove Root, and install stock software.

Update

This guide is for the 1st-gen Fire TV with Clockworkmod custom recovery installed. Do not follow this guide if you have TWRP on a Fire TV 1. To unroot the Fire TV 2, follow this guide.

Important: Once you complete this guide, you will not be able to root your Fire TV again. New Fire TVs are not rootable. A rooted Fire TV is more valuable than a non-rootable Fire TV because it is rare. You may want to consider selling your rooted Fire TV through eBay or Craigslist instead of unrooting.

This guide assumes your Fire TV has ClockworkMod and/or a custom ROM installed as outlined by my Rooting Starter Guide. If your Fire TV is just rooted without ClockworkMod and without a custom ROM, then to unroot, you just need to let it install a stock update.

It’s a good idea to have updates blocked via your router while following this guide. It’s not required, but it ensures an update doesn’t slip in at the wrong time before you’re done reverting everything.

If your Fire TV is running pre-rooted ROM version 51.1.4.1 or greater, then download and install pre-rooted ROM version 51.1.4.0_514006420 updated.
Your Fire TV MUST be on 51.1.4.0 or older before proceeding.

Transfer the recovery.img file you downloaded in step 1 to your Fire TV’s /sdcard directory by running this command:adb push recovery.img /sdcard/(Be sure to replace recovery.img with the full path to the file on your computer.)

Run the command: adb shell

Run the command: su

Run the command: pm enable com.amazon.dcp

Run the command: chmod 777 /cache

Run the command: chmod 777 /cache/recovery
Note: If you see a message saying “No such file or directory”, then run the following two commands:

mkdir /cache/recovery

chmod 777 /cache/recovery

Run the command: cd /cache/recovery

Run the command: echo --update_package=/cache/update.zip > command

Run the command:dd if=/sdcard/recovery.img of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/recovery

Run the command: rm -f /cache/*.bin

Run the command: rm -f /cache/*.zip

Run the command: exit

Run the command (yes, again): exit

Transfer the update.zip file you downloaded in step 3 to your Fire TVs /cache directory by running the command:adb push update.zip /cache/(Be sure to replace update.zip with the full path to the file on your computer.)

Run the command adb reboot recovery

Your Fire TV will reboot and install stock software version 51.1.1.0. At this point your FIre TV is completely stock, unrooted, without clockworkmod, and without the boot menu. Your Fire TV will still be rootable and, if your bootloader was unlocked, it will still be unlocked. You can now remove the blocked update URLs from your router and let your Fire TV update over-the-air. Be aware that, once you let your Fire TV update, you will not be able to root it anymore and your bootloader will be permanently locked.

Thanks for this. I have 6 rooted. I did it early on because I wasn’t sure how committed Amazon was to the platform. Turns out they have added just about everything I need, no need to spend several hours updating boxes every few months. Unless nozebleed has some outstanding reason for keeping them rooted.

I was thinking the same statement. I’m trying to think of a reason, to keep my two Amazon Fire TV rooted. We can use the external drive now and Kodi work on the box. I read the AFT is valuable rooted…other than that, I don’t see a reason to stay rooted. I feel we’re missing some great updates. Does anyone else see a reason to stay rooted???

Rooted FTV allows custom launchers to replace ATV launcher and have a Ruku experience using Rbox’s custom tools. There is also the possibility someday that Amazon might block Kodi if there are complaints from the movie industry that its media boxes are complicit in copyright violations. Lots of reasons to remain rooted, plus they sell for more than a regular second hand Fire TV, especially when Amazon finally patches the exploit.

I have a rooted Fire TV and a 2nd gen stock. One of the main reasons to keep root is because I have a lot of movies on my external drive that are over 4 gb. My new Fire TV will not play them and probably never will.

Reason number 2 is Google Play Store on root. Amazon nor Google will never allow that and hopefully soon somebody will make a custom rom for Android TV. I would like to see what the differences are between the two without buying the actual device. I like the results of google now which are much much better than Amazon Alexa I am not sure if Alexa will ever catch up.

Amen to that! I would never remove my root. Selling a rooted one would be way better than forever “stocking” it. Rooted FireTVs are becoming an oddity. I understand why people want to know how to do this though. There’s no way to update to FireOS 5 AND keep root. Shitty scenario because OS5 had Alex!

i missed the Oct 9th live newscast and didn’t see an answer to my unroot question i posted to it. can you use supersu’s “fully unroot” tool to temporarily unroot the fire tv. and if that works, can you regain root by just installing a rbox preroot rom thru custom recovery?

Yeah, over time I hope being on an older firmware doesn’t cause some of our apps to stop working on our rooted ftv1s running on the older firmware. (eg.netflix,hulu, etc). Otherwise we may have to go out & buy another device and/or sell the rooted device or do this unroot/update.

Mine keeps circling and erroring. It works on my firetv stick. Along with all the other apps that seems to not like root. The stick stinks at streaming, too much lagging.
Does BTN2go work on yours? mine restarts the app on both my rooted ftvs..

1- if one has su, busybox, and so on installed will this get rid up them?
2- updates are blocked at the Fire TV level. Do you first have to unblock them and then apply the process or will the process just naturally unblock them?

I am trying to revert a rooted 2nd generation fire tv to stock. Unfortunately, the /cache partition only has a size of 242.1M, which is smaller than the stock firmware zip.

Any thoughts on how to proceed? I tried pushing the update.zip to /sdcard/ and using
“echo –update_package=/sdcard/update.zip > command”, but without luck.

My next thought was to enable updates and wait until Amazon pushes the next one, but although using
“pm enable com.amazon.dcp” appears to work, I am still unable to check for updates from settings.

I noticed that my device has “/dev/block/platform/mtk-msdc.0/by-name/recovery” instead of “/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/recovery”, so I am wondering if writing the recovery image to that file is preventing recovery from functioning at all. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Hi.
I have a 1st gen fire tv, that was rooted.
I was trying to remove the root and enable updates, so I removed all the installed apps (including su), and did a factory reset.
Now I can’t follow this guide as I don’t have su access, and I can’t receive new software version since the ClockworkMod is installed.
Is there a way to remove the CM whithout su ?
Thanks.

I have this same problem too. I can not get playstation vue to work because I had to modify su to xsu and after a recent Vue update it does not work anymore. Can anyone help me out on this? I have 51.1.6.3 and it seems this one is stuck in terms of upgrading and even unrooting from what I can tell since I can’t access su using adb commands.

I accidentally forgot to do step 6 (downgrading to pre-rooted from 51.1.4.0), and realized it after going through all the steps.

So after going through all the steps, I was on 51.1.1.0. I rooted and installed the older stock recovery to try to downgrade to 51.1.0.2 to try to flash clockword mod so that I can flash the rooted 51.1.4.0.

However, when I tried to downgrade to 51.1.0.2, the install was not successful after rebooting to recovery.

I unrooted mine because I want the latest update and don’t want to wait. I’ve had my FireTV rooted ever since I got it, but find that I don’t utilize any root features. Having the Play Store and Google Framework installed was the main reason I had for rooting, and those don’t even work any more (white screen).

After the last step, i am getting a message that says “The System Update was not successful. your Amazon Fire TV will restart in a few minutes and should resume normal operation.” The fire TV still shows 51.1.4.0 (I had to downgrade to this per step 6 since i was running 51.1.4.1).

I followed the steps but in the end it gave me an error while trying to update –
The System Update was not successful. your Amazon Fire TV will restart in a few minutes and should resume normal operation.

Are you sure you are not rooted? If you flashed a rooted rom you should be rooted. Well, if you can access twrp then maybe get the latest flashable supersu.zip (Thats ZIP) and flash that in twrp.
I couldn’t do the 5.0 upgrade, IIRC I restored my 51.x backup and then flashed the rooted 5.2 firmware.

Thanks for this guide. Unrooted my FireTV 1st gen. Too many apps I couldn’t use because of root. Other than a chance of KODI being blocked someday I saw no reason to keep it. I’m enjoying it much more now.

so my AFTV gen 1 had towelroot and SU something in the installed apps… I bought it like this and did not do the config or have any real knowledge of it. and I just wanted to return it to be a regular FireTV.

Without looking into it in detail I did a factory reset…….. which I now realise was stupid.

It was fine initially and it started a software update after being reset…

now it boots up and all I see is the white amazon pic… then a green robot with spinning blue geometry in it’s body – with a loading bar that gets about 1/3 across then restarts again.

I can’t post a link to the photos I just took… as this is my first post

I have tried using a windows keyboard and the ALT + PrntScr + i combination during boot up to get to the console and so far this does not work.

I would love some guidance, or simply the feedback that I should give up and chuck it in the bin now!

The new Amazon Fire TV looks nice but I don’t have a 4k tv so there’s no need for me to upgrade now. I could switch down to the Fire TV Stick 2 but my Fire TV 1 is perfectly adequate except I can’t get Thursday night football through Prime Video.